For nearly four decades, PRA has been committed to challenging anti-LGBTQ movements by exposing tactics of the Christian Right through research and analysis.
Since 2013, PRA has prioritized research and tracking of attacks on transgender communities to support activists leading the fight for national and global transgender rights and justice.
As the U.S. Christian Right increased its platforming of anti-trans feminists, PRA saw an important opportunity to partner with transgender-led organizations to identify, challenge, and provide training on anti-trans rhetoric (such as the denying of trans people’s access to gendered public facilities and resources) to feminist and women’s organizations.
In the past two years, PRA has trained over 100 organizations, including the Strong Families Network, offering tools and resources to accomplish two objectives: 1) countering anti-trans rhetoric rooted in feminism, and 2) situating anti-trans movements within the Christian Right.
“PRA’s training on how to identify, disrupt, and resist anti-trans feminist rhetoric gave us valuable tools in our work to unite communities to win rights, recognition and resources for all families. Through a clearer understanding of how anti-trans feminists are partnering with the Christian Right and a keener sense of their tactics, we are better prepared to stand in solidarity with trans communities. After training our staff, we brought this training to our network of partner orgs, and had 20 organizations join us for a robust conversation.”
Alongside our trainings, PRA published analytical pieces on anti-trans feminist activism, culminating in a comprehensive three-year retrospective of anti-trans feminist legislative advocacy that demonstrates how anti-trans feminists are only successful when they function as a mouthpiece for the Christian Right. In 2020, PRA Senior Research Analyst Heron Greenesmith, the author of the retrospective, gave a public presentation on disrupting anti-trans feminist advocacy to kick-off PRA’s webinar series.
PRA continues to counter anti-trans rhetoric through tailored trainings that support transgender justice and promote intersectional feminist framing. The next phase of Greenesmith’s research will focus on interrogating and challenging White feminist practices platformed by the Christian Right with a particular focus on anti-sex work feminism and gender critical conversation therapy.
Ensuring the safety and inclusion of transgender community members, particularly transgender people of color, is critical to the broader social justice movement. PRA is committed to continuing this work as we fight for a multiracial, inclusive feminist democracy.
“The gender ideology monitoring group has been very valuable to the Advancing Universal Rights and Justice team at AWID. The information shared in calls has enriched our anti-rights monitoring and analysis, and connections made in the group have led to, for example, collaboration on monitoring anti-rights events, new relationships with media, and overall a stronger more connected web of organizations and individuals resisting these trends – a very important contribution in the current context!”
